This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 5, 2015, and Caleb Brown.

A new piece of Senate legislation might be the most substantial reform to sentencing in many years,

reducing federal sentences for many crimes and making many

other past reforms retroactive to current inmates.

But it's not all positive.

The legislation Describe the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015.

This is a piece of legislation co-sponsored by Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Dick Durbin of Illinois.

Well, it's a historic bipartisan sentencing reform and prison reform bill that came out of Congress

on Thursday of last week.

It has extensive bipartisan support across the political spectrum and it would reform

mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes.

Some of the longest and worst sentences

would be reduced and made more reasonable.

And it would also allow federal prisoners

to earn time credits off of their sentences

for completing rehabilitative

programming. Where's the backlash before we started recording you described you

said there was a backlash against some of the some of the elements here?

Cheryl Walt Pavlow at Forbes wrote an article talking about some of the feasibility concerns about the

back end portion of the bill in terms of its reliance on halfway houses, which are very scarce in the federal prison system.

So I think there's a little bit of concern from families against mandatory minimums who I represent about the new mandatory

minimum sentences in the bill.

...